This NPC dreams of being awesome. Will you help him achieve his dreams?

[begooler]

Does your campaign include weaponized cookies, magical closets that turn evidence collected by law enforcement into character wealth, salty sea wenches, drug trafficking and supernaturally delicious cake?
Then get out of this thread or I'll send the black tentacles at you again.

If you answered, 'no' read on, I need your advice.

I have a PC in my campaign who is a warforged crusader that worships Moradin. He has a mentor who is a dwarf that is the head of the temple of Moradin in the city as well as a master smith.
Both of us have determined that this relationship is eventually going to end in bloodshed as character development sends the warforged to the lower depths of the alignment spectrum.
The PC will probably be level 9 or 10 when this fight happens. He is a sword and board whose main tactics are divine surge and mountain hammer.

I want to stat up this NPC so that his features make sense for a temple leader who spends much of his time crafting, but I want him to be viable in combat against the warforged, if only by coincidence. "Father Gregorie" is a hard working dwarf and a believer in the adage 'idle hands are the devils' workshop.' His advice on many spiritual matters is that people should learn a craft, work hard at it, and spend time in contemplation while doing physical labor.

So, I require:
1- His class features must be focused on what he does every day: smithing and crafting, but just so happen to work out for combat
2- He will have an item familiar. The item familiar he has should be powerful when wielded by him in a fight, but much much less powerful once the PC gets a hold of it. It should also have a high ego score. It has been passed down for generations, so it will probably have intelligent item abilities beyond just those from being a familiar. It cannot speak or use telepathy. It's special purpose will probably be protecting the Gregorie family line.
3- While the item familiar should provide advantages for crafting, it shouldn't end up as a big freebie awesome item for the artificer in the party
4- He must be able to cast 4th level spells, but none higher. He must be no higher level than 9. He does not have minions.

Combat ideas related to his trade:
-Sundering. This makes sense as an ability for him to focus on for his work, but also happens to be a combat skill.
- Spells that affect metal and stone, including some that affect warforged. Many come from the druid list (hence archivist instead of cleric) I need some good ones that make sense for him to have to aid crafting. Rusting Grasp would be great for damage, alas, why the heck would a smith want to destroy his creations with rust?
-Iaijutsu Focus. Pros: the attack can be used on objects, so it makes sense for him to have this for hammering on weapons he's making. Cons: Not a class skill (though i could add it for Kensai. There's no way he is going to catch the warforged flat footed, since he's definitely going to be the one who gets attacked first. (Or is there?) Also, can Iaijutsu focus be used to sunder a weapon as if it were an inanimate object? Do you have to draw the weapon in the same round when using against an object?

So far:
Father Gregorie
Archivist 7 Kensai(CWar) 2 ?

Why Archivist? It has skill points he needs, and provides druid spells useful for manipulating stone and metal.
Why Kensai? It lets him add an enhancement to his weapon that won't translate into ridiculous loot.

Feats: Item Familiar, Combat Expertise*, Weapon Focus Heavy Mace*, Improved Disarm**

*dumb feats required for PrC
**just taking advantage of Combat Expertise, but I might ditch this

Want: Improved Sunder. It could replace Improved Disarm, but where to fit in Power Attack?

Some example spells:
Animate Rope, Wood Shape, Stone Shape, Minor Creation, Animate Fire, Heat/Chill Metal, Warp Wood, Blades of Fire
Cure/Vigor spells

I still expect the warforged to beat the cheese out of this guy when the time comes, I just want the fight to be something more interesting than the warforged cutting the NPC in half in the first round.

Books: Core, Completes, Races, SpC, MIC, other things as needed such as a few things taken from Eberron, but generally not Faerrun. I'm not opposed to homebrew or dragon magazine, but those aren't things the players have access to, so it would be best to avoid them.

[Zonugal]

Are you settled on the NPC being a divine caster?

[begooler]

Yeah.
He has already raised one of the characters, removed paralysis, cured, restored etc, so he needs to have the cleric list.

The party doesn't have a cleric (unless you count the scout with the travel devotion dip) and therefor they tend to go to this temple and pay him to cast spells for them whenever they need cleric spells.

[Gavinfoxx]

Consider Metal Melt (SpC) for welding and mixing metals into alloys and destroying weapons and stuff, Shape Metal (RoF) for getting the broad shapes of things. Consider that he may have access to Wall of Iron *EDIT: I MEAN STONE!* at level 3 from a Trapsmith with Alternate Source Spell or Southern Magician (hehehe). That would be interesting... Consider giving him that item from the fabulous cats article for unseen servant. Consider making a variant of that but for Unseen Crafter or something like that. Look at the list in the Complete Macgyver link of what things an Unseen Servant can do, and figure out that he might have some ways to defend himself using that.


Also consider how valuable his prayerbook will be as loot to sell to another Archivist.

[Madeiner]

Well, i have to say, this is an npc that will probably die in the first combat he sees.
Why the need for selecting exact feats and classes?
Lately i've been making NPCs using very high fiat levels.

You don't even need to give him a class.
He'll be around for 6-7 rounds, tops. Give him something "cool" to do for those rounds, even if they don't come from specific classes or feats.
The players will not generally notice what specific class your npc's are.
If they see something they don't recognise, they'll assume you have found some forgotten book and took from there.

You want a smith-type caster?
Start with a cleric. Then give him addinational abilities. If you want to keep balance, just remove feats or other abilities.
Well, give him the ability to animate and command work tools. Maybe also the ability to "convince" the other characters weapons to work less effectively. (charm weapons?)
Give him heat metal & chill metal at close range and so on.

I have noticed that by doing this, i save up hours on making npc stat blocs. Yes, they do not abide the rules, but they are much more interesting than standard npcs.

When i have to make a "fighter npcs", i take a monster and use it as template to gauge CR. Then i simply decide how much damage he does with each attack. Maybe remove some feats to keep balance.

I recently did a nice monster.
It started as a demon on a hellish horse found in an adventure module. I decided the mount and the demon were instead a single creature. Gave him a lance and some additional damage. I remember there existed feats like spirited charge, but didn't look at the prerequisites.
I instead gave him the ability to charge and deal x2 damage, and after a succesfull charge, he teleported a few feet away, continuing the charge on another target. This costed "3 feats" for me.

Does not obey the rules, but you are the DM, you dont need to follow rules (and spend hours on each npc that dies in 4 rounds), you just need to create balanced and fun encounters.

[big teej]

just some ideas that sprang to mind reading your post.


the Battlesmith - races of stone
runepriest(?) - also races of stone

there's a crafting based incarnum class that is described as "friendly competitive with battlesmiths" you could easily toss that in as well.


see also: ancestor weapons, you guessed it, races of stone.

I guess what I"m trying to say here is...

read races of stone.

[begooler]

Aha! Thank you for referring me to the obvious. Gee where would there be a book that has prestige classes and feats for crafting? doh.

Battlesmith is really appropriate. I'm still not sure if it would work better than Kensai, and both have draining feat requirements.

[Zonugal]

One possible path, as to maintain divine casting, is to go with something like Cleric 5/Battlesmith 1/Rune Priest 5 (from one of those Faerun books)?

Another possible option is to dig into Weapons of Legacy...